Poetry in British Sign Language and English

Cats and bank update

The last couple of days have been spent on housework and settling in the new cats. They’re very chalk and cheese, with personalities as different as their markings. Yuki (Japanese for ‘snow’) is a pure white 3-month-old kitten, with some oriental good looks and smooth fur, with Siamese-sized ears (i.e. like little radar dishes on his head) that, in a perfect example of life’s little ironies, are stone deaf. So far I’ve tried the traditional clicking of fingers and clapping hands, and the less-traditional blast of music from my phone, but perhaps the most convincing evidence is that when The Doctor and Alex were sucked, screaming, into the cupboard, he didn’t even twitch. I’m looking forward to what happens when I bring out the hoover. He’s a playful but chilled kitten, who seems just as happy sleeping on his back on the sofa as he is killing random motes of dust and bits of fluff on the floor.

Lucy is an ancient, slightly grumpy, 22-year-old long-haired black moggy with a white bib and socks who lives for food. Her favourite activities so far have been lying on random patches of the kitchen floor, or the dining room floor, or on the landing, and eating. If she could spend all day with her face in a food bowl, I have no doubt she would. Yes, she does have an underactive thyroid, and if anything this has worked in her favour, as I wrap the pills in chicken. She’s already started to follow me when I open the fridge.

I’m happy that the cats are settling in, but still not sure what to do about Yuki when he’s been here long enough to – in theory – be let out. Do we set up a fence in the garden? We’ve already got a harness so we can take him out supervised. He’s not the brightest cat, and pretty fearless, so letting him out unsupervised is a risk at best, I’m all for deaf empowerment, but he’s too pretty to be run over by the boy racers we sometimes get round here. Am trying to teach him some basic signs / hand signals but it’s not going well. Mind you, I suppose it’s asking too much of the attention span of a 13-week-old kitten.

To clear up some confusion, my cat Faraday (whose picture is still my personal profile pic) who lived with me at my flat in Bristol passed away last November after a suspected kidney infection turned out to be end-stage renal failure. She came from the RSPCA at the age of 16, as I wanted a quiet cat to hang out at flat with me. This she did quite happily in return for a soft sofa and all the boiled chicken and felix she could eat, and when she went, she was 19-and-a-half. I still miss that bloody cat.

Tabby, who disappeared so mysteriously four months ago, was my parents’ cat, who came to live with us from RSPCA when I was about 14 or 15 after about two or three years of asking, persuading and eventually begging on my part. She was, as her name suggests, an ordinary tabby cat that I loved dearly, but she never quite forgave me for moving away to Uni, and then for moving away again to my own place, so our relationship over the last few years had been distant, at best. If I didn’t know better, I could almost put her disappearance a mere two months after I moved back in down to spite. I still wish I knew where the hell she went. Quite apart from closure, it’s like a Rubik’s cube that you can’t figure out. The solution is there somewhere, but you’re damned if you can work out what it is.

Bank update – I have sent a reply to the £15 letter (£15!) basically saying that I am not satisfied, that I feel that HSBC needs to improve its deaf and disability awareness as a whole, that having two minicoms for the text-phone service seems like a low number given that there are approximately 9 million people in UK with some form of deafness, (that is what they said, they have two minicoms and that service users may sometimes experience a short delay when call volumes exceed what they expect. I said I don’t consider nine failed attempts to get through and the phone ringing out for fifteen minutes a short delay) and I think I even managed to find a higher horse than the one I got on in my original complaint. I quoted discrimination law and said if HSBC didn’t respond in a way that satisfied me, I was going to the financial ombudsman. I’m in the mood for a fight.

The irony though is; I set up new accounts with an online bank. My application was accepted and I attempted to sign in for the first time. Only to forget the answers to all of my security questions and get a pop-up message telling me to call them to resolve the issues.

Post navigation

1 thought on “Cats and bank update”

Your cats sound like great characters. Sounds like they’ve got themselves a wonderful new home with you. My dear old Marmaduke died last year aged 18 and I still miss him terribly so know where you’re coming from.
Keep going with the bank shenanigans – victory wiLl be yours!